Anterior segment image of a metastatic deposit on the iris
Courtesy: Bob Tapper, Royal London Hospital, London, UK
Clinical precision
Clinical precision Professor Afzal Ansary ASIS FRPS
It may be a little-known discipline, but clinical photography plays a huge role in medicine and its teaching, explains Professor Afzal Ansary
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Today, visual documentation of patients is integral to healthcare in the UK. But even these days many patients ask why they’re being photographed. There is a lack of understanding, it seems, among some patients as well as the public at large, of the role of clinical photography in healthcare. Application of photography to medicine is almost as old as photography itself. Soon after photography was invented, French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne documented facial expressions triggered by electric DIGIT Magazine 2022 Issue 2
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stimulation to study ‘physiology of emotion’. Duchenne was convinced that the ‘truth’ of his pathognomic experiments could only be effectively rendered by photography, the subject’s expressions being too fleeting to be drawn or painted. ‘Only photography,’ he wrote, ‘as truthful as a mirror, could attain such desirable perfection’. In the early days patients were photographed either by the high street portrait photographer or the doctor treating the patient, but these days most large
university teaching and NHS Trust hospitals have a department of medical illustration, providing a variety of services including clinical photography. The types of skills required to take these photographs have also moved on. Besides being a technically competent photographer, clinical photographers are required to have a basic knowledge of radiological orientation, human anatomy and physiology, pathology, surgical procedures and medical terminology. They need to have an understanding of the sort of work done in specialist areas of medicine, 15
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